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Figure 7-17. Use Define Views to create a new view.

Figure 7-18. Use the New View dialog box to create a custom view.

Aside from creating or adjusting the default view, you can also sort messages using the Sort By option on the View menu. By default, messages are sorted by date in ascending order (the most recent messages appear at the bottom of the list). You can adjust this behavior so that messages are sorted differently, such as by subject, flags, attachments, and so on.

You can also flag, watch, or ignore messages. If you choose View, Columns, you see the Columns dialog box, shown in Figure 7-19, which enables you to choose the columns you want to display in the message list, such as Priority, Flag, Subject, Watch/Ignore, and so on. The list varies slightly by the type of mail account; for example, Hotmail

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Figure 7-19. Select the columns you want to display.

accounts don’t include the Flag or Priority columns. Make sure that any columns you want to view are selected. You can also use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to configure column order.

The Watch/Ignore and Flag message options give you ways to call attention to or ignore certain e-mail items. If you choose to flag a message, a small flag appears next to it so that you can remind yourself that the message is important. If you choose to watch a message, the message is displayed in red and an eyeglasses icon appears in the Watch/ Ignore column, whereas ignored messages are grayed out, and the international symbol for No is displayed in the Watch/Ignore column. How you use these features depends entirely on your needs, but their purpose is to help you organize messages so that you can manage and respond to them effectively.

Creating Message Rules

Message rules provide a way to handle e-mail and news messages according to such criteria as sender, subject, or date. You can use rules to have all messages from a certain person sent directly to a certain folder or to have all messages with certain subject keywords sent to a certain folder. Rules can also be used to automatically place mail in your Deleted Items folder, such as in the case of junk mail or mail from people you do not want to talk to. Separate sets of rules can be created for POP e-mail messages and for news messages, but you’re most likely to use rules to process your e-mail. The following steps take you through the process of creating a basic mail rule:

1In Outlook Express, choose Tools, Message Rules, Mail.

The first time you choose Message Rules, you will see the New Mail Rule dialog box. After one or more rules have been created, you’ll see the Message Rules dialog box shown in Figure 7-20 on the next page.

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Figure 7-20. Existing rules appear on the Mail Rules or News Rules tab of the Message Rules dialog box.

2If the New Mail Rule dialog box appears, skip to step 3. If the Message Rules dialog box appears, any existing rules appear on the Mail Rules or News Rules tab. Select the Mail Rules tab and click New.

3Create a new rule in the New Mail Rule dialog box, as shown in Figure 7-21. Follow the numbered sections of the dialog box to first select a condition that a message must meet to be affected by the rule, then select the action to perform on the matching messages, add necessary details to the action (such as selecting a name, subject words, or a folder), and type a descriptive

Figure 7-21. Create your rule by selecting its conditions, actions, and description.

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name for the rule. Figure 7-21 shows that e-mail that contains specific words in the subject line should be moved to a certain folder. To complete the rule, in the Rule Description section, click the Contains Specific Words link, enter the desired words, and then click the Specified link to specify the folder you want the mail moved to. Add a friendly name for the rule, and click OK. As you receive mail that meets these conditions, the mail will automatically be moved to the designated folder. Click OK when you are done and repeat the process to create additional rules.

There are many more conditions and actions you can apply to rules than just moving specified mail to a certain folder. For example, you can:

●Mark certain messages as read, watched, or ignored

●Flag certain messages

●Automatically forward certain messages to certain users

●Reply to certain messages automatically with a standard e-mail that you create ahead of time

●Highlight certain messages and automatically delete other messages

If you scroll through the Actions list, you’ll see there are many different actions that you can apply. Become familiar with the conditions and actions available to you so that you can create rules that meet your needs.

In addition to creating rules using the New Mail Rule dialog box, you can create a new rule based on a message that you receive. For example, you might want to automatically delete messages from a certain sender or with a particular subject heading. Rather than manually creating the rule, you can simply select or open the message, and choose Message, Create Rule From Message. The New Mail Rule dialog box appears with the preselected condition to select other messages with the same From line. You can adjust that condition to the Subject line or any other condition, depending on what you want the rule to do.

Remember that rules can be modified, toggled on or off, or deleted at any time. Also, remember that once you have several rules defined, your mail is filtered through the rules from top to bottom, so you’ll want to use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to order the rules so they work most effectively. Like e-mail, message rules tend to be an ever changing and evolving process that need your periodic attention to manage mail and news in the manner that you want.

Managing Spam

Spam, or junk e-mail, is a problem that plagues all e-mail users to one degree or another. You can use Outlook Express rules to automatically send junk e-mail to your Deleted Items folder. However, this process is not foolproof. You have to

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identify the keywords that you want the rule to use to identify a piece of e-mail as junk mail, and you have to be careful that those keywords do not delete mail that you really want. To use Outlook Express mail rules to manage junk mail, follow these guidelines:

1Create one rule that defines mail that should be trashed, such as pornography keywords and other indicators that you know belong in the Deleted Items folder. You can periodically scan the folder to make sure no good mail has accidentally fallen into the folder, and then delete the items.

2Use a second rule with less certain keywords, such as sale, special, limited time, and so on. Send e-mails matching this condition to a folder called Junk, for example. Every few days, scan this folder to make sure nothing you really need has ended up there, and then delete all items in the folder.

3The remaining mail should be allowed into your Inbox. But if you receive mail in your Inbox that turns out to be junk, use the Create Rule From Message option just described to help refine what goes in the trash. Of course, these rules do not stop 100% of the junk mail, but they do help tremendously.

In addition to using rules to manage junk mail, you can also use the Blocked Senders list. The Blocked Senders list identifies a particular e-mail address. When an e-mail is received from a person on the Blocked Senders list, the e-mail is sent directly to the Deleted Items folder. To block a sender, select or open the offending e-mail message and choose Message, Block Sender. A message appears telling you that the sender has been added to the Blocked Senders list. If you want to review or adjust the list, choose Tools, Message Rules, Blocked Senders List. You can remove a user from the Blocked Senders list by clicking Remove, or you can temporarily toggle a user’s blocking on and off by selecting or clearing the check boxes next to the user’s address for Mail, News, or both types of messages. If you know the address of a sender you want to block, you don’t have to wait to receive the next message. Just click Add, and manually type the sender’s e-mail address to add him or her to the Blocked Senders list.

Importing and Exporting Messages

You can easily import or export messages to and from Outlook Express. This feature enables you to move mail from one computer to another as needed. When you import mail, you can select from about a dozen programs that you want to import from. When you export mail, you export from Outlook Express to Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Exchange. Perhaps you have been using Netscape Communicator for e-mail, but you now want to use Outlook Express. Using Outlook Express, you can choose File, Import, Messages, and select Netscape Communicator, as shown in Figure 7-22. If prompted, specify the location of the Communicator mail, and then complete the wizard to import the mail.

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Figure 7-22. You can import messages directly from these e-mail programs.

Finding Messages

Outlook Express provides a quick and easy Find feature so you can find messages or people. If you choose Edit, Find (or click the arrow next to the Find button on the toolbar), you see an option to find a message, a message in a particular folder, or people. If you click the Message option, a Find Message dialog box appears, shown in Figure 7-23. You can search for messages based on text you enter in the To, From, Subject, and Message boxes. If you know the approximate time frame when the message was received, you can also search using the Received Before and Received After

Figure 7-23. Use the Find Message dialog box to search for messages meeting certain conditions you have specified.

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options, which will help narrow the search. You can further narrow the search to certain folders (click the Browse button to select folders) and to messages that are flagged and/or have attachments. If you select multiple criteria, only messages matching all the conditions will be found. If you don’t receive any matches but believe the message you’re looking for is in your folders somewhere, try making the search more general.

To search for people’s e-mail addresses or other information on the Internet (or in your domain’s Active Directory), see “Configuring a Directory Service Account,” page 188.

Managing the Appearance of Outlook Express

Outlook Express gives you considerable control over its appearance. By default, you will see your folders in the left pane’s Folders list, the selected folder’s contents in the message list, and a selected message’s contents in the Preview pane. This is usually the easiest way to use Outlook Express, but if you want to experiment with different views, choose View, Layout. Figure 7-24 shows how you can select the elements of Outlook Express you want to display. You can experiment with the different settings and see which configuration you prefer.

Figure 7-24. Configure the appearance of Outlook Express using the Window Layout Properties dialog box.

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Using the Address Book

Windows Address Book is an application designed to work with Outlook Express as well as other Windows applications that use contact data. You can store all kinds

of contact information in Address Book, and you can even access it directly by clicking the Address Book button on the Outlook Express toolbar. You can also open Address Book by choosing Start, All Programs, Accessories, Address Book or by typing wab from a command prompt.

Windows Address Book gives you a simple interface, shown in Figure 7-25. You can store contact information in the Shared Contacts folder or the Identity folder for your account. To create new contacts or groups (or a new folder to contain new contacts or groups), click the New button, and choose New Contact, New Group, or New Folder.

tip Organizing Contacts into Groups

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If you have a lot of contacts, consider using the New Folder command so that you can group them in subfolders. This will make browsing the contacts much easier. Also, grouping contacts gives you an easy way to send e-mail to a collection of contacts. However, some ISPs have strict restrictions on the number of users you can send an identical e-mail message to at one time. Check with your ISP for details.

Figure 7-25. Windows Address Book provides a central location to store contact information and organize your contacts.

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tip Add Senders to Your Address Book Easily

You can easily add a user to your address book directly from an e-mail message

that you have received. Just right-click the message in the message list, and click Add Sender To Address Book. You can also open the Options dialog box to the Send tab, and select Automatically Put People I Reply To In My Address Book. This option assumes that if you’re responding to an e-mail once, there’s a good chance you might want to have that person’s e-mail address handy in the future as well.

As you will see, Address Book is easy to use and very intuitive, but it should be noted that the use of identities is not a security feature; rather, it is an organizational feature. Any user can see all of the contacts by typing wab /a at a command prompt (include the full path to the wab.exe program or first switch to the directory that contains it, which by default is C:\Program Files\Outlook Express), so if you want to ensure that your contacts are private, you should not use identities. Instead, each user should log on with his or her own user account so that Windows XP can create and maintain a completely separate Address Book file for each user.

As with mail messages, you can also import and export your address book. If you want to import an address book other than the one created by Windows Address Book, choose File, Import, Other Address Book. The Address Book Import Tool

will prompt you to select the kind of address book file you want to import, as shown in Figure 7-26. When you export from Windows Address Book by choosing File, Export, Address Book, your address book is saved as a Windows Address Book file with a .wab file extension, which you can then import into other address book programs. If you want to export your address book as a text file (comma separated values) or as a Microsoft Exchange personal address book, choose File, Export, Other Address Book.

Figure 7-26. You can import address books from several different programs.

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Using Keyboard Shortcuts

If you like the efficiency of using keyboard shortcuts, Outlook Express has its fair share. You can see a complete listing of keyboard shortcuts by searching Outlook Express online Help for keyboard shortcuts. Table 7-2 lists the more popular shortcuts.

Table 7-2. Popular Outlook Express Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+M	Send and receive e-mail
Ctrl+P	Print the selected message
Del	Delete the selected message
Ctrl+N	Create a new message
Ctrl+R	Reply to selected message
Ctrl+Shift+R	Reply to all
Ctrl+F	Forward the selected message
Ctrl+I	Go to Inbox
Ctrl+Enter	Mark a message as read
Esc	Close a message
F3	Find text
Ctrl+Shift+F	Find message
F7	Check spelling

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